She is with a man, of course. She always is. There are so many men, and she is generally the only woman among them. Protocol usually keeps the passions in check. But this man — he is from Moldova. He is the prime minister. He has suffered and survived. Now he is in the party room of the U. S. Department of State, the aptly named Ben Franklin Room. Outside, the State Department is colorless, brutalist — Moldovan. Inside, in its retrofitted showplaces, it is Colonial Williamsburg. It is vast and fancy, as detailed as a wedding cake. The light from the chandeliers is transfigured in the goblets of wine.

It is a party for Moldova!

People are commenting about the Moldovan flag. They have never seen such a flag. Of all the hundreds of flags that the State Department keeps in its flag room, it must be one of the most unusual. It features an eagle with a cross in its mouth and both an olive branch and a scepter in its talons. It is a very busy eagle and a very busy flag, and there are two of them on the stage of the Ben Franklin Room, coupled with two American flags, flanking a lectern. Also flanking the lectern are His Excellency Vladimir Filat and the U. S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

He is wearing a dark-blue suit by the Moldovan designer Vladimir. She is wearing black pants and a boxy jacket, creamsicle in color, jauntily severe, country-club Maoist, with a scarf wrapped around her neck like a bandage. Her hands are folded before her, and among the men assembled around the lectern, she looks as small as a Rolling Stone.

She speaks first and says something typically excellent about the political strife that has engulfed Moldova over the last year. "We know it was not easy," she says. "We know that it came at political cost. But it was so important because it has established a democratic Moldova that has, for the first time, a democratically elected prime minister in eight years."

His Excellency is next. She adjusts the microphone for him, then her hands refold. He speaks through an interpreter, so that there's a line break between his sentences and it sounds like he's reading poetry. He has thin hair and thin lips and he does not smile. He lives in the last Eastern Bloc country to give up communism. He is downcast and beholden, and he is on the receiving end of 262 million American dollars, courtesy of one of the State Department's development arms. He is going to build roads!

And then, wait a second — he is reading poetry. "I must say that since I have arrived in the United States, I had very little sleep. But at the same time, since I have arrived here, I have the impression that I am living a dream with my eyes open. And that I have lived, and I still live, a very beautiful dream. A dream that I have had and I have wished for so long."

It is beautiful and desperate. Diplomacy — the language of war recast into the language of love — is neither. Diplomacy is remarkably unpoetic, and as such it suits the masterfully prosaic woman onstage. She is nodding and smiling opaquely, and when His Excellency ends his speech by saying, beautifully and desperately, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," the color of her composed face deepens beyond the color of her makeup.

It is a moment beyond protocol, and like so many moments orchestrated by Hillary Clinton, it makes you feel patriotic. She is the one indispensable woman of the one indispensable nation! She is reasserting not just American ideals but American power, which is what we all want! She has come to accept the goodness and rightness of American power! She understands that American ideals flow from American power, not the other way around! At the same time, it makes you wonder what the hell she is doing with the prime minister of Moldova, when she might have been, could have been...

Hillary Clinton is not the president of the United States. Barack Obama is. She ran and lost. She tried to make history, and Barack Obama made history instead. Now she works for him. Barack Obama is the president of the United States, and Hillary Clinton is the secretary of state. Although some people call her the most powerful woman in the world, she has precisely as much power as her boss allows her to have. If she is unhappy about this, her unhappiness does not show. She works heroically hard at her job and is very good at it. She even seems liberated by it — by its unceasing demands and unforgiving strictures as well as by the loyalty it requires.

Her loss to Barack Obama was not the first time she experienced public pain, nor the first time she responded to the experience of public pain with a display of public mastery. Indeed, the dynamic of pain and mastery — of mastered pain — is what has made her a political celebrity. When her husband was elected president in 1992, he suggested that his was a copresidency with his wife and gave her the responsibility of leading health-care reform; when health-care reform failed, the copresidency failed with it, and she responded by becoming the most ambitious and effective — as well as the most loved and hated — First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. When her husband was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath about sex with a White House intern, she responded by establishing residency in a state where she had never lived and running for the open Senate seat in New York. Despite being the most divisive political figure in the country, she won easily in 2000 and then again in 2006, and became such a pragmatic and conciliatory legislator that she also became a popular one, especially with her Republican colleagues. For the first time in her career, she was known more for the admiration she elicited than for the enmity she aroused, and her ascension to the presidency was regarded as an inevitability akin to a restoration.

The pain of her loss to Barack Obama was not only the pain of thwarted ambition. It was the pain of inevitability coming undone. The presumption behind the presumption of inevitability was that she was in control at all times. As it turned out, she was not even in control of her campaign. That she stayed in the race till the bitter end proved her pluck and averted humiliation but did nothing to restore the sense that she was almost unforgivably competent. Indeed, what arose out of her loss — and, crucially, out of Obama's win — was a consensus, as unmistakable as it was silent, that it was finally time to forgive Hillary Clinton for the things that have made her Hillary Clinton.

It is hard to say whether Obama picked her for the secretary of state job because he forgave her, because he felt indebted to her, or simply because she was still who she was and there was no one else like her. "He needed another rock star," one of her longtime friends and supporters says. "He was a rock star, but he knew he was going to have to concentrate on domestic issues. He needed another rock star to travel the world because he knew he couldn't. He didn't want to have to worry about it, and now he doesn't. It says a lot about him — his confidence — that there can be two rock stars in his administration."

And it says a lot about her that she took the job. She liked being senator more than she liked being a candidate, and after her defeat, she was still senator and she still liked it. As Senator Clinton, she would be able to redeem herself through work, as she had always done. She might even be able to hide. But there was an aspect of her personality that was as essential to her narrative as her narrative was to her invention of modern political celebrity in its female form. When she was First Lady, she had not just suffered private pain at the hands of the most powerful politician in the world, and she had not just responded to the pain politically, by becoming senator; she had suffered private pain at the hands of the most powerful politician in the world and responded to the pain politically while at the same time remaining loyal to him. She could not allow herself the pleasures of her own historical significance except by standing by her man.

Now she had suffered pain again at the hands of the most powerful politician in the world, except that this time his name was Barack Obama. And she not only left the job she loved to take the job he offered; she did this and has remained loyal to him. She remained loyal to him while watching him risk his political capital on health-care reform; while watching him try to make nice with the vast right-wing conspiracy; while watching him leak power like a tire stuck through with a tenpenny nail. "It has been as hard a year as you can imagine, politically," says one of her deputies. "But her loyalty to Obama has been incredible. She never says 'my agenda'; she says 'our agenda.' She never says 'what I am going to do,' only 'what we are going to do.' She is incredibly disciplined and she never complains. I couldn't fucking do it."

One result of her loyalty is that she's made him look good. It's right there in the polls: Americans approve of Obama's foreign policy far more than they approve of his domestic agenda. Which means that she's also made him look bad. We will never know if Hillary Clinton would have made a great president. What we do know, based on the way she's done her job as secretary of state — with her loyalty feeding her capacity for self-sacrifice and self-sacrifice awakening her genius for competence — is that she'd probably make a great president now, having lost her chance forever.

There is a woman who won't sit down. There is a woman who won't shut up. She keeps asking questions. She keeps offering her own answers. She's relentless and she rubs people the wrong way. And now Hillary Clinton has to deal with her.

She is — they are — at a town-hall-style meeting marking her first anniversary as secretary of state. She is — they are — in the main auditorium in the Moldovan sprawl of Foggy Bottom. Madam Secretary is onstage, standing in front of a set of flags — one the flag of her department, the other the flag of her country — and behind a lectern adorned with the seal of the Department of State. She's wearing a pantsuit, natch, in a purply blue that catches the color of her eyes. She's got cheekbones like elbows, and her tousled hair, at once soft and helmety, is styled to accentuate them. She's got her two front teeth showing even in her closed-mouth smile. She's got a black choker around her neck, and she looks lovely and ravaged at the same time, as if her exhausting engagement with the world has left her permanently postcoital.

She is, as always, in transition. The day before, she went on a day trip to Montreal, where the Canadian government had convened a conference on Haitian relief. After this, she's going to leave for London, where the British prime minister is cohosting a conference on Afghanistan. Still, she's the boss, and now she has to meet with her employees. She has almost thirty thousand of them. They work all over the globe, many for low wages in dangerous places. A small portion are here, in the packed auditorium, and most of the rest are following the meeting on a video broadcast. She is popular with them. They are not surprised that she is a decent boss, in the sense that she is a caring one. They are, however, gratified that she is a decent boss in the sense that she is an effective one. Her campaign, after all, was so notoriously dysfunctional that it has served not only as an explanation for her not being president but also as a rationale: If she couldn't run a campaign, how could she run the country?

Now, though, she's running one of the most important departments in the federal government, and running it as if to reform it is to redeem it, and herself. The State Department was broken when Hillary Clinton took over for Condoleezza Rice. It was broken not just because it discounted the diplomacy it was created to conduct and had stopped reaching out to the world; it was broken in a more fundamental way: It had stopped living up to its most basic responsibilities and promises. In the eight years of the Bush administration, U. S. foreign policy became increasingly militarized, and whatever was not commandeered by the Department of Defense was increasingly let out to contractors. As a result, one of the Secretary's first acts as Secretary was to hire Jacob Lew, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, as deputy secretary. And the first thing they did — besides asking for, and getting, "growth budgets" — was simply to get more people "on the ground" in places like Afghanistan. What they wanted, says Lew, was to make sure that the American digging the well in the Afghan village was not always an American soldier. They wanted to make sure that it could just as easily be an American civilian.

Many of the Secretary's chosen experts and advisors are in the audience. Most of those involved in the meeting, however, are those who make up the vast majority of the State Department: career foreign-service and civil-service employees. They listen respectfully when the Secretary speaks of "smart power" and "the goal of elevating diplomacy and development and making them equal partners with defense"; they laugh and cheer when she says, "And I'm proud to announce that next week, we will be cutting the ribbon on the free showers" being installed in the Harry S. Truman Building.

And so what happens toward the end of the meeting is probably inevitable: A middle-aged woman in a green jacket stands up and says into the microphone, "I'm concerned that I've been here for eleven years and I've never had a good supervisor."

There's some laughter, and there's even more when the Secretary says, "Well, shall we give equal time to your supervisors?"

But then the woman says, "I've been discriminated against," and the Secretary says, "Well, I think we have procedures inside State you can follow," and the woman says, "Which I have done," and the Secretary says, Well, just because you've spoken to someone, "that doesn't mean they're going to always side with you... ." It's almost as if the Secretary has decided to guest-star in an episode of The Office until suddenly she becomes Hillary Clinton again and says, "I mean, I've had more criticism in my life than probably whole countries have had." Now, that garners some applause, and yet the woman in the green jacket is not going anywhere. She asks, "So what can I do if the union didn't help me and the Office of Civil Rights didn't help me?"

And the Secretary — no, Hillary — says, "Well, I think you need to ask yourself why nobody is agreeing with you."

And you know what? It's beautiful, in the same way her throttled emotion at the Moldovan signing ceremony was beautiful. It's a large expense of spirit on something very small. She was kind to this woman, almost tender. She was diplomatic. And she cut her off at the knees! She is not president but she is presidential. She has gotten not what she has always wanted but somehow what she has always been given — a second chance, on an ever-larger stage. This time, she's gone global. She occupies a role commensurate with the scale and scope of her ambition; the only problem is that there are days when it seems she has gained the world at the cost of finding the world her glass ceiling.

She was always in the process of becoming. There was always the sense that she became one thing on the condition that she could become another: that she became First Lady on the condition that she could become senator, and that she became senator on the condition that she could become president. There was always another layer to which she could aspire, and the aspiration, as much as the accomplishment, is what gave her meaning. More than any other figure of her generation, her public ambitions were tied to her self-actualization, and her quest for self-actualization is what turned out to be public property. It belonged to anyone who, well, loved her. She was able to pursue her public ambitions in the conviction that what she was doing she was doing for others, and those who followed her could follow her in the conviction that what they were doing they were doing for themselves. It is why she could be so careful and cautious a candidate, and at the same time drive people crazy.

Now there is nothing left for her to become, except perhaps herself. She is not running for president. She will never be president, unless something terrible happens. Her pilgrimage has become gruelingly literal rather than thrillingly metaphorical; instead of becoming, she comes and she goes. And then she comes and she goes, and she comes and she goes... .

She travels a lot. In her first year as secretary of state, she traveled a quarter of a million miles on behalf of President Obama and the American citizenry. Her staff ventures that she has become the most well traveled woman in the world, and if this seems a consolation prize of a superlative — the most powerful woman in the world, the most famous woman in the world, the most significant female political figure in American history is now also the most well traveled? — consider that she made all the other superlatives possible when she took it upon herself to be the most well traveled First Lady. She is no stranger to being a stranger. Though she considers herself a homebody, she is prepared, as no one else could ever be, to do the job that not only Obama but history itself demands of her: to reengage the world after eight years of driving it away.

It is not as easy as it sounds. It is, in fact, as hard as it looks. The Bush administration based its foreign policy on the millennial notion that was supposed to be liberating but turned out to be crippling — namely, that the United States, as the only global superpower, was entitled to dictate terms. It didn't do diplomacy, or even dialogue; instead, it asserted, and expected the world to assent. When countries didn't, the United States stopped talking to them. We had almost stopped talking to Russia, for God's sake. Now it is Hillary Clinton's job to restart the conversations. It's her job to talk to everyone, and to either take the call or attend the meeting of everyone who wants to talk to her. She has to be ... popular, and one of the intangibles she brings to her job is that she already is. "There is no one in the world who won't take her call and no one in the world who isn't very keen on seeing her," says a senior State Department official. She has succeeded in this part of her job almost too well: She is henpecked. It is possible, when traveling with her, to see her disappear into a room full of statesmen and strongmen while a scheduler frets outside the door about the intensity of the demands on her diplomatic time: "All these countries that want strategic dialogues! We elevated India to the level of strategic dialogue and so we had to elevate Pakistan, but now there's like eighteen million countries that want to have strategic dialogues! It's just become a total status issue."

Her global celebrity is what makes her indispensable to the administration. At the same time, it marginalizes her as a political figure — and makes her Endless Tour a form of ironic exile. Other than the president himself, the Obama administration has no greater political asset than Hillary Clinton, and certainly no one, including the president, who understands politics better than she does. It's what she brings to her job as diplomat: the knowledge that all states have their politics, even authoritarian ones, and that all heads of state, even despots, have issues they have to sell. And yet if she is of Washington, she is rarely in it. She has been dispatched, and left to make her home in foreign policy.

You don't know how she does what she does. You don't know how anyone possibly could. You see her use her hands to push herself up when it's time to stand up from the day's work at the dais; you see her use the banister when she's climbing the steep steps from the runway to the waiting plane. You see her so tired that her face looks almost punctured. You see her emerging from one closed-door conference after another, standing next to one ceremonial man after another, speaking in the same dead diplomatic tongue, staring at him and nodding as he speaks in a language she doesn't understand, and you wonder if the job she has taken is a parodic reiteration of the poses she mastered as a political wife. You wonder, as you have always wondered, what goes on in her mind while her face sets itself into its unruffled mask. And you wonder, mainly, when she is going to yawn. She never does. Her job seems to dare her to yawn, and yet she never does, while you, you who worry about her as you follow her, you who wonder where she gets her strength from ..."Well, I appreciate your coming on the trips and following us around," Hillary Clinton says when you get the chance to visit her at the State Department. She gives you her hand, and it is small and lightly freckled.

"It was an education," you say.

"I hope so!" she says. And then she laughs — no, this exhausted woman you were so worried about, she's laughing, in ten distinct girlish peals. There's a difference, and Hillary Clinton makes you aware of it. She doesn't laugh to comment on anything, or because she finds any one particular thing funny. She starts laughing because she wants to find something funny, and so everything is. It's sort of like there's a river of laughter running underneath the conversation — or under her conception of the conversation — and if you just open your mouth and say anything at all, you're dipping in. The whole dynamic is a little stoned, to tell the truth.

"You want some coffee?" she says in a sweet voice, kind of a date voice. "Would you care for — "

"Water would be great."

"We've got that!" she says. She's in the habit of speaking in exclamation points as an icebreaker. She's also in the habit of being solicitous. She's also in the habit of being obliging. She's also in the habit of self-preservation by any means possible. Her manners are very midwestern in that she charms by being charmed; her husband's are very southern in that he is compelled to be the charmer; but at bottom the manners of both are very Clintonian in that they are both at core inviolable and unstoppable. Her stamina has become the most shocking thing about her, but it's not simply that she doesn't stop; it's that she won't let herself stop, or let anyone else stop her. It's not simply that she doesn't get sick; it's that she can't get sick and so refuses to. She will cancel interviews if she hears a reporter cough; and on one leg of your travels with her, she buried people with her own rude health, and so now when she starts talking, as she frequently does, about the physical demands of travel — "It wears you out," she says. "The jet lag, the dry air on planes, the whole 'If it's Tuesday, I must be in ...' kind of thing" — you're embarrassed to admit that while she was stepping off the plane in Paris, you were getting sick on the runway.

"Oh!" she says. "Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Oh, I'm so sorry! Oh, dear!"

The woman might be made of iron. But the woman also has a great laugh, and you hear it now. Her smile accentuates who she is — it cuts a long swath across her broad face, and its cunning relieves her of the burden of innocence. Her laugh, though, undoes her. It's sudden, and she sometimes has to throw her head back to accommodate it. It's totally unmeasured, and it lets you know that she's a woman who likes being entertained, a woman who's used to being entertained — a woman who likes to roar. Her marriage has always been the greatest mystery of American political life. But once you hear her laugh, it becomes a little less mysterious. It becomes explicable on simple human terms.

"Well, knock on wood. I do have good stamina and resilience. But you would think, in the world in which we live today, that with instantaneous communications, that you wouldn't need to travel as much. But, in fact, you almost have to travel more, both because everybody knows you can get on an airplane and get to where they are expecting you, but also because it's almost as if the virtual reality cries out for the real relationship to be affirmed. It's ironic. You go back and look at diplomatic history, or any kind of history ..."

Oh, wait, that's right — it's never going to be all laughs with Hillary Clinton. For one thing, she is, as one of her senior advisors says, "married to Bill Clinton. She loves ideas. She reads everything you give her. She's not like, C'mon, give me a break. She's open for business." For another, she's Madam Secretary. She's dressed in a black pantsuit with gold piping, and it's like an updated version of a Roman toga — clothes in the color of empire. On her finger she's sporting the chandelier her husband gave her, and at her throat is a gold medallion of some worthy noble rendered in profile, either Caesar or Richard Holbrooke. She's sitting on a couch, knees together, back straight, and all around her spreads the slightly stale magnificence of State. Of the sixty-seven secretaries of State, sixty-five have had oil paintings made in their image; the key to State Department decor is that the more venerable the subject of the painting on the wall, the more elaborate the digs. Well, the painting hanging in Hillary Clinton's suite is Thomas Jefferson, who got the whole thing started. Forget Colonial Williamsburg; her suite is the Smithsonian. And it suits her. It all does. You ask her what's the hardest part about her job and this is how she answers: "Because I represent the United States, the stakes are so high. Other countries don't carry the weight that we do behind every word. So people parse every word, every possible body-language interpretation. So you have to be on all the time. And you have to be aware of that all the time. The grind would be just going from one thing to another. But it's more than that. It's not allowing yourself to be caught up in the grind. It's being aware and alert, listening for the nuance, looking for the opening, reading between the lines of what someone is telling you."

The hardest part? The hardest part is that she can't make a mistake. The hardest part, she says, is that "if you lift an eyebrow, people might write about it. And I'm prone to lift my eyebrows."

In someone else's mouth, it would sound like a complaint. In hers it doesn't. There is no doubt that the obliterating totality of her job is the reason she won't do her job for more than one presidential term. There is also no doubt that her job is something of a relief to her, and that what's most impossible about it is what has set her free. In truth, she has always seemed a little stiff. She has always seemed to manage even her own spontaneity, rationing it out in short bursts. Her rhetorical achievements have always fallen short of her practical ones. She has labored under the presumption that what the public asks of her is only for her to be herself. And she has hated, above all, answering questions about her personal life.

Now she never does. She doesn't have to answer questions about her personal life because it's assumed she doesn't have one. She doesn't have to worry about being herself because she can't be herself. She doesn't have to worry about speaking in inspiring rhetoric because in most cases she has to speak in code. She's stiff as a matter of propriety and spontaneous only insofar as her spontaneity can be used to charm men who are icier than she is. Do you see? She has found a job the peculiarities of which are her peculiarities, the strangeness of which is her strangeness. She's made it. She's been — another superlative — the most scrutinized woman in the world, and her marriage has been the most scrutinized marriage in the history of the world. Now she's a sixty-two-year-old woman who lives with her mother in Washington when she's not traveling, and who occasionally sees her husband. And nobody asks about it, because it would offend the conventions of protocol. She's safe, and so is her mystery. And if, in return for that safety, she can't yawn?

It is late when the elevator doors open and Hillary Clinton steps through them. It's around ten o'clock at night, and she hasn't stopped working since her plane landed an hour outside London at sunrise. She has met with the foreign minister of Indonesia. She has met with the foreign minister of Turkey. She has met with the notoriously difficult foreign minister of Russia. She has met with the British foreign minister and they have both met with the foreign minister of Yemen. She has gone to a reception hosted by Prince Charles. They were all men, of course, and now, in the night, she is meeting another.

Down the hall of the hotel, Hamid Karzai awaits.

He is the president of Afghanistan, and although the evidence of obvious fraud surrounding his reelection last summer made people think he was also a gangster, he is in the hotel's presidential suite. The meeting he is having with Hillary Clinton is their first since his tainted inauguration. The United States is at war in Afghanistan, for Afghanistan, and yet the questions about Karzai's legitimacy were part of what made Obama's decision to remain at war in Afghanistan so protracted and so difficult. Obama made his decision with Hillary Clinton's input, but it was his decision, not hers. She is meeting with Karzai now as Obama's representative, as she meets with everyone else. The meeting is meant as a gesture of public intimacy — of public affirmation — before the start of the London Conference on Afghanistan in the morning, and even though it is taking place like an assignation, in a hotel room, there is a small tribe of reporters, photographers, and cameramen waiting for her elevator, and she seems surprised: "Oh, hello..."

She steps onto the carpet, smiling, and makes her way to the threshold of Karzai's hallway. Then she has to wait. She is surrounded by members of her diplomatic security detail and by aides staring into their BlackBerrys like fairy-tale mirrors, and they all have to wait. The TV cameramen shine their lights upon her, and in the nighttime gloom of the hotel hallway, the lights are at once invasive and distancing, lending her a kind of underwater exoticism. They paint her in tabloid colors, and yet she is no longer tabloid fodder, no longer hunted or harried. She is untouchable. The clot of humanity assigned to her observes an almost churchy silence in her presence. There are no questions, and when she finally gets the go-ahead, the only sound among the members of the press who follow is the sound of their obedient shuffling, the sound of animals in the chute. When they are admitted to the splendor of Karzai's suite, the first thing they hear Hillary Clinton saying to Hamid Karzai is this: "I love it! And the foreign minister told me it was snowing... ."

"It has been snowing two days in a row there," Karzai says. He is talking about Kabul. He is wearing black, and with his shiny tonsured head and trimmed beard, he looks Ben Kingsley — esque, blessed with an urgent sense of dignity and also the capability for sly malevolence. "The snow was a very good thing," he says, because Afghanistan needed the water.

She laughs, a deep chuckle bound up in her throat. "So you need the snow!"

"Yes," Karzai says. "We need the snow."

And then, almost as quickly as it began, it is over. This is all the theatrical intimacy that protocol allows, and the press is herded out as it was herded in, until a photographer with a Dickensian plea in his voice says, "A handshake, Secretary. Just a handshake..."

"Of course, of course!" she says, and laughs again. To a locustlike chorus of cameras, she shakes hands with Karzai in front of the fireplace, and then a TV reporter shouts, "Secretary Clinton, is the government of the United States prepared to allow [Taliban fighters] on the blacklist to take part in government?"

"I'm looking forward to the conference tomorrow, and we're here to support President Karzai and his government and the people of Afghanistan!"

"Does that include people on the blacklist?"

"Well, I think we're going to wait to see how the conference goes tomorrow... ." She does not leave, of course. She winds up talking to Karzai for well over an hour, into the night. She winds up pressing him on issues from women's rights to government reform. She winds up being joined by the three ongoing architects of America's Afghan policy: Special Representative Richard Holbrooke, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, and General Stanley McChrystal. And yet there is something strange, and strangely revealing, about the meeting. It is not simply the air of precisely orchestrated artificiality, for that is the air she now must breathe; it is not even the sight of Hillary Clinton sitting to the right of the likes of Hamid Karzai, in the traditional position of diplomatic subservience. No, what's strange about the meeting is where she doesn't sit, for the night she meets with Karzai in London is also the night Barack Obama is delivering his State of the Union Address in Washington, D. C. The president is fighting for his political life, and the secretary of state isn't there.

It is not a snub or a slight; the London Conference was scheduled before the State of the Union, and she wanted to go. Indeed, she asked the president if she could attend it instead of his address — if she could be excused. What she couldn't be excused from, however, was her curious political fate: to bolster the fortunes of a tin-pot potentate instead of those of the leader of the free world; to be every man's woman except the men she's most loyal to.

There are two prevailing interpretations of Hillary Clinton's performance as secretary of state. The first is that she's a soft-power specialist who's used her celebrity to call for women's rights and Internet freedom instead of getting treaties signed. In this view, she is as much a symbolic traveler as she is a diplomatic one, emblematic of a foreign policy notable for good intentions over actual accomplishment. She gets to continue the Hillary story while yet another layer of men in her life — Defense Secretary Robert Gates, National Security Advisor James Jones, and Vice-President Joe Biden — do the hard work of projecting American power abroad.

More and more, however, this interpretation has given way to another: that the quality she brings to the job is not her celebrity but rather her unfathomable and almost unsettling doggedness. If, for instance, she has succeeded in "resetting the relationship" with Russia — and ultimately in securing a new a strategic-arms treaty — it's not because she's famous; it's because she knows how to deal with difficult men, including Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. As a senior official says about Lavrov: "He's a hard man to get along well with. He's all business and the business often negative. But she understands the need to keep at it. She's always prepared to make the call even if it's not a lot of fun. And it's not always a lot of fun. The last thing she wants to do is get up early and make the call, but she does it. She's never prepared not to make the call."

She is not soft. She simply hardens herself through her own rituals of endurance, and that makes her harder than her boss could ever be. The problem Barack Obama has faced abroad is the same one he has faced at home: For some reason, people have no qualms about telling him no. He has used salesmanship as a substitute for statesmanship, and he has often been unable to close. In its first year, the Obama administration was able to live up to its goal of reengaging the world; in its second, "engagement has to be linked to outcomes," she says. "We're going to demonstrate clearly that we don't engage for the sake of engaging. It's not something we do because we're enamored of the process of talking. We do it because we are trying to advance American interests and values and to protect the security of our country and that of our friends and allies."

And so it has been, and so we have seen. One of the greatest embarrassments of the Obama administration's first year was Iran's nearly theatrical refusal of the hand Obama extended; now nearly everywhere she goes, the secretary of state is calling for the international community to get behind the idea of isolating Iran with sanctions — or, in her words, "turning up the heat and working on the pressure track on our two-track approach to Iran." But nothing in diplomacy is achieved in isolation, and as she turns up the heat on Iran, she finds herself turning up the heat on China, since China has promised to veto the imposition of sanctions on Iran in the UN Security Council. She has engaged China, sure, but along the lines articulated by one of her deputies: "I don't think China respects countries that don't defend their strategic interests, and Secretary Clinton understands that." Her signature issues, then, are not soft-power issues; they are the two countries that will largely determine the extent of American power in this century, Iran and China, and if the foreign policy she is pursuing is closer to the vigorous foreign policy she promised during her campaign for the presidency than it is to the conciliatory one Barack Obama envisioned in his: Well, that still doesn't mean she's anything less than loyal.

It is hard for her to turn around. There is so much at stake in her travel that the predisposition, always, is to keep going. Like so much else in her diplomatic life, it is an expression of all the lives she has lived before, a culmination of sorts. She has turned around only once, and that was when she was in Hawaii, on her way to Asia, and she received the news of the Haitian earthquake. It was the most agonizing decision she has made as secretary of state, and when she made it, the people around her finally knew just how bad it was: knew that it was a historic catastrophe; knew, indeed, that people they knew — a State Department employee and an employee's family — were buried in the writhing ruins.

And then it happened again a month later: no, not an earthquake, not a natural disaster; rather, a personal one. She was about to enter a meeting with one of the men she is loyal to when she found that the other was hospitalized and undergoing emergency surgery. She finished the meeting with Barack Obama and flew up to New York to see her husband, Bill Clinton, and then she had to make a decision whether to go on the trip she was supposed to be taking to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. She wound up staying with her husband until she could ascertain that he was okay, and then she got on the plane and two days later she turned up the heat yet again on Iran, saying, for the first time, that it was on its way to becoming a military dictatorship. It was her job, you see. There is love; and there is loyalty; and there is loneliness; and somewhere out there beyond them all is the world, and it waits for her with open arms.